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how safe do you feel with basic autopilot?
- Thread starter gflar
- Start date
Tl;dr. On version 2023.26.7: No phantom braking in 525 miles. No panic braking for traffic crossing its path. Better acceleration getting back up to speed after traffic slowdowns.
On software 2023.26.7, I just had the most impressive basic autopilot road trip that I’ve ever experienced. I’m talking *basic* Autopilot (TACC+AutoSteer). I take a 525-mile (R/T) road trip about every 4-6 weeks (about 20 times so far in this car) and on this occasion, I had zero phantom braking events compared to the 1-2 mild events normally. I also had zero “unnecessary braking” events as well. What I call unnecessary braking is when the car see something up the road (or in an adjacent lane) that it wrongly decides it needs to brake for. Usually this is traffic crossing its path on a 4-lane divided highway, and it usually brakes *after* the car in question has actually cleared our lane.
On this most recent trip, a semi was waiting to make a left turn across our lanes and it decided to go in front of me. It was about 8-10 seconds ahead, well inside the “panic zone” of the car. I usually hover over the accelerator preparing to override the brake, but since there was nobody behind me I thought I’d let the car handle the situation. To my surprise, it didn’t brake and didn’t even roll off the throttle. So, either they are updating the AP highway stack with some of the newer FSD Highway code or the car never saw the truck.
I’m hoping for the former. Especially since I had 3 other cross-traffic instances on this trip that the car handled perfectly (by not braking when it didn’t need to).I also had one incidence of “lane incursion” by another vehicle where the car would normally over-brake and this time it simply slowed by 1-2 mph and resumed speed when it determined that the car was moving back into its lane. I also noticed that TACC now gets back up to speed much more quickly after getting caught behind slower traffic. A much more natural acceleration curve, IMO. From a dead stop, however, it still can’t keep up with a 20-year-old F-150 pulling a landscaping trailer
Last night I updated to 2023.26.8, so I expect all this goodness to be rolled back…
On the sort of large roads where it's designed to be be used I think AP is great, for the most part. The lane centring is borderline supernatural. I have driven in heavy rain conditions where there is spray and glare from the sun and it never waivers. It's also great when lanes get uncomfortably narrow in roadworks.
Acceleration could be better, but I love the way it anticipates vehicles moving in to your lane and decelerates before they do - so much better than my previous radar cruise car, that would wait until the vehicle got half way in to the lane then suddenly realise it was there and panic.
On smaller roads it's less good, but it's not really designed to be used there anyway so I cut it some slack. Provided it's got a lead vehicle to follow it's still pretty good.
Acceleration could be better, but I love the way it anticipates vehicles moving in to your lane and decelerates before they do - so much better than my previous radar cruise car, that would wait until the vehicle got half way in to the lane then suddenly realise it was there and panic.
On smaller roads it's less good, but it's not really designed to be used there anyway so I cut it some slack. Provided it's got a lead vehicle to follow it's still pretty good.
gtae07
Member
Interesting...
I'm on 26.7 also and tried to use it in stop and go traffic during rush hour yesterday. Not sure if it was the guy in front of me or the AP but I got a couple of brake activations as the car was waiting too long to let up and slow down. Finally had to kick it off after a hard stop.
I've been avoiding TACC on non-divided roads if there's traffic to avoid the panic stops; maybe I'll have to give that another try...
SourJellybeans
Member
Unfortunately, not safe enough to use it the majority of the time anymore. My main issues are:
- Phantom braking, which happens mostly when approaching the crest of a hill, but has happened at random times as well (those that come to mind: a vehicle merging from 2 lanes over, while coming up on a semitruck with a chrome rear bumper, and when on an undivided highway). This might be TACC and not AP, but seeing as you can't use AP without TACC, and Tesla's manual puts TACC as a subsection of AP for the Model 3, I'll include it here.
- Poor lane merge behavior, i.e. when there's an on-ramp and the two lanes merge together, the car tries to center itself in the now double-wide lane, gets over to the right and then follows it back as the lane narrows.
- Divided highways/freeways only
- No hills OR it needs to be dense enough traffic that cresting any hill will still have a car directly in front of me to follow.
- No cars close enough behind me that if the car suddenly brakes, I'm worried about getting rear-ended.
- No upcoming lane merges, which means either a 3-lane divided highway where I can sit in the middle lane or a 2-lane divided highway with very long stretches between merges.
BitJam
Active Member
My experience is very different from yours. I use AP for most of my driving, the majority of which is on undivided roads. If I know or suspect the car is going to do the wrong thing then I take over or I'm ready to take over. For example, if I knew or suspected the car would center incorrectly at a lane merge then I would simply take over the steering to keep the car correctly centered.
My approach is to treat it as driver assistance, not driver replacement. I'm not trying to see how well the car can do on its own. The game I play is to see how well the car and I can do working together.
I'm happier with AP than I was with FSDb. FSD was doing a lot of silly and unsafe things: missing turns, creeping way too close to 55 mph traffic, silly lane changes, stopping 50 feet before a traffic light, and getting the navigation wrong so it can't even drive me to the grocery store.
Granted, AP can't drive me to the grocery store either, but on the sections of road where I use it, it mostly works well. The problems I had with FSD almost all involved features that extended beyond simple AP.
This behaviour was tweaked in a release a couple of months back. It may still not be to your liking (lane merges are not where AP shines) but it is a lot better than it was. You may not have noticed if you don’t use it.
Huh? So you disengage it on every on/off ramp and then re-engage? That's the only way to stop the lane centering problem with merging lanes.
Also there is no "working together", either you are in control or the car is. Yes you can and should take over but driving with autopilot is literally a game of how much risk do I want to take to see if the car avoids a problem before I take over.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
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The false promises of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving
Its robots in cars getting coffee — or getting confused by roundabouts — for the latest episode of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave.
www.theverge.com
Tesla is marketing and trying to sell you a product that doesn’t exist,” said Nabilah Hussain, a lawyer leading one of several ongoing lawsuits against Tesla. “At no point during the marketing and sale of these vehicles was Tesla even remotely close to having a vehicle that was gonna be fully self-driving. And that’s true today.”
In episode five of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave, we look at what went wrong, why Tesla may never deliver a fully driverless vehicle, and what real autonomy actually looks like.
johnny_cakes
Member
I listened to the episode and found it quite interesting and entertaining. Their experience testing FSD Beta is consistent with mine.The false promises of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving
Its robots in cars getting coffee — or getting confused by roundabouts — for the latest episode of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave.
Tesla is marketing and trying to sell you a product that doesn’t exist,” said Nabilah Hussain, a lawyer leading one of several ongoing lawsuits against Tesla. “At no point during the marketing and sale of these vehicles was Tesla even remotely close to having a vehicle that was gonna be fully self-driving. And that’s true today.”
In episode five of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave, we look at what went wrong, why Tesla may never deliver a fully driverless vehicle, and what real autonomy actually looks like.
BitJam
Active Member
No. I would simply take over the steering while I leave TACC enabled. There are three intersections in town here where AP doesn't get the lanes right if it's not following a car so I just take over the steering at those locations when needed.
The above is a good example of working together where the car controls the speed and I briefly take care of the steering. It is the same procedure I use when passing on a highway.
I frequently adjust the speed with the scroll wheel and by tapping on the screen. This is the opposite case where the car is doing the steering and I control the speed. I will also control the speed with the accelerator pedal when the car wants to slow down too much (usually for cross traffic or for someone slowing down to turn off the road).
When the car is doing the steering and I control the speed or when the car controls the speed and I take over the steering, we are working together. IMO Tesla did a really good job of integrating manual and automatic driving. I find it easy and enjoyable. I would not buy a car that does not have this or better.
It's possible that the difference between people loving AP and hating/disliking it is this attitude that there is no "working together" and either you are in control or the car is. I tried that when I first got the car. I wanted to see how well AP worked on its own. The answer was "not great". With the help of some suggestions here I changed the game from seeing how well the car can do on its own to seeing how well we can do when I work together with the car. For me, this game is a lot more fun.
As for risk, I am confident AP plus a driver is much safer than AP or the driver alone. About a year ago AP saved the life of a young deer that ran in front of my car at night. By the time I saw the deer, it was too close to stop in time but I instinctively slammed on the brakes anyway. Turns out AP saw the deer before I did and started hard braking before I did and saved the deer's life. I was quite shaken by the experience because I was absolutely certain we were going to hit the deer. This was one of the reasons I started trying to maximize my use of AP. As I may have said before, I do about 80% of my driving with AP enabled. I could probably push it to 90%.
A similar incident where the car saved the life of a kid that ran into the road was reported here recently:
Well said.
I was/am an FSDb hater/sceptic so was only using AP exactly as you use it and, when it works, it works well as a co-driver (handling some of the task, not all of it.) I do have FSD so the EAP features, but tend to not use them.
In June 2022, I had a terrible 3500km drive with it where I seem to hit every use-case where AP wasn't a good co-driver (i.e. construction where it felt the lane was too narrow so TACC wouldn't maintain the reduced speed limit so I could steer, fog and torrential rain where it threw up its figurative hands and alarmed to say it wasn't going to help at all.) Combined with its inability to differentiate between highway #60 signs and speed limit signs thus alternating between 60 and 80 kph for that 2 hour drive, over the 2021/22 year AP was pretty useless to me on my long highway driving trips unless weather conditions and highway numbers didn't confuse it.
I've experienced AP slowing and swerving the car to avoid a suddenly revealed piece of sheet metal in my lane.
(Not applicable to the OP's question about basic AP) My husband is an FSDb user (highway only for navigating, not using it for city streets, in other words as an Enhanced version of EAP) and it has now improved enough that I will use it where I used to use AP. I recently did a test using FSDb and then AP on the same road (swapping between because I have the 2 profiles) and found FSDb is now better than basic AP. There are extreme deficits but it is now smoother than AP for the AP uses. Currently, FSDb is not the $$$$$ better that the price intimates, but it is better and basic AP users can look forward to a big improvement when the 'single stack' future update arrives.
We also had a deer experience while on FSDb where the car didn't react at all (the angle of approach was too far off the front camera's view) but my husband was able to react and brake in time, leaving the deer to kill itself against a different car at some time in the future. Whether on AP, FSDb or just driving oneself, I think a shout-out to the excellent brakes is called for. The car is very stable when you slam on the brakes, probably the best vehicle I've ever owned for this (hopefully) seldom used action.
But all this is part of your well-described working together with the badly named software, since neither AP or FSDb software lives up to their names but both can make long drives much less stressful/physically demanding.
Thanks for your clarification, appreciate the context.
I would say that manually disengaging the auto-steer by taking over the wheel is still disengaging. The driving scenario you describe is actually a worse experience than just driving without autopilot at all, for me. Physically moving the wheel with enough force to disengage is jarring and not a comfortable/convenient drive experience.
I get where you are coming from about "working together" but candidly that scenario is a worse user experience than just using plain jane cruise control (which has no phantom braking) in my ICE truck. In other words "working together" is a worse experience than having autopilot off. That's pretty bad.
I find it interesting that you claim you would not buy a car without this experience while I maintain that just autopilot full *off* is a better experience. Also regular cruise control in every other car on the planet is superior to the cruise portion Tesla has which still suffers from dangerous phantom braking.
Sandollars
I bleed Cardinal
100% percent on the freeways. FSD on surface streets can be sketchy so I keep a close eye on her. My car is named Christine II (Christine I is my Model S w/FSD) after the Stephen King novel of the same name for a reason….. Despite her arbitrary attempts to occasionally kill me, I use FSD at least 80% of the time.
SourJellybeans
Member
I've been using AP a lot more lately, and over the weekend updated to 2023.44.30.5.1 and I have to say - the phantom braking seems MUCH better. I drove about 400 miles after updating it, mostly divided freeway with some undivided highways and I have had 0 phantom braking events, even though there were a lot of blind crests that in the past I'd expect it to slow down at.
There is a new behavior that I haven't noticed much before, which is the "Lowering speed for emergency lights" occurring much more frequently. I know that feature was introduced in like 2021 but I can only recall seeing it once before the 2023.44.30.5.1 update. This weekend I had 1 legitimate trigger and about 4-5 false positives. All the FPs occurred at dusk or later, when people had their headlights on and flashing may have happened just from objects passing in front of oncoming cars on the divided freeway. That said, the slowdown is much less severe than the phantom braking events in the past, and at least it gives a message to indicate why it slowed down.
The lane merge behavior is maybe a little better but still a problem - I'd say about 70% of the time it's fine, 20% it's not great but still acceptable, and 10% of the time it's absolutely unacceptable. Like the car will veer sharply to the right, then try to correct, then correct for the correction, etc. It's like a dampened sine wave. I would be worried about getting pulled over for suspicion of DUI if the police saw that.
Overall, during that 400 mile drive, I probably used AP for maybe 320 miles, with brief disengagements for merging cars and the like. My confidence in it is definitely higher than 4 months ago, and I do appreciate how less fatigued I feel when using it. Since I'll be repeating the drive a few more times over the next month, I'm going to try to use AP even more.
Also, I don't feel like it really nags me more than it used to. Maybe even a little less. It has absolutely called me out when I'm trying to adjust something on the screen, like navigation, but I feel like it nags less when I'm fully paying attention.
On freeways I feel very safe with the basic autopilot. The only incident I remember is when there was a piece of a dividing line missing due to earlier road repair, and the autopilot swerved into the center of the new, now twice as wide, lane. I am sure though that the autopilot would not swerve into another car, so it does not worry me too much. And it was only one isolated incident. Now I know the place and expect the mistake whenever I pass by there.
The autopilot sometimes gently brakes when it gets afraid of something, like rarely when overtaking a truck in a left curve. And it has its own ideas about speed in junctions. But I can always disable it and drive junctions manually.
The autopilot sometimes gently brakes when it gets afraid of something, like rarely when overtaking a truck in a left curve. And it has its own ideas about speed in junctions. But I can always disable it and drive junctions manually.
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